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Voluntary cooperation of state-funded research institutes brightens the future of Korean lunar exploration (2015.03.15)
- Date : 2015-04-16
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KIST Project Management Team
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‘Convergence Research on Lunar Exploration’ which is an advanced research task for the Korean lunar exploration project is making successful progress. The research task kicked off in January 2014 by 15 state-funded research institutes engaged in four sub-categories; moon explorer, payload, ground stations of Korean deep space network and lunar exploration rover. The significance of the research task lies in the fact that it is conducted with a budget (KRW 7.3 billion) the state-run research institutes voluntarily contributed for the successful implementation of the Korean lunar exploration project.
Successful outcomes were produced over the past year. First, core technologies necessary for the Korean lunar exploration project were identified and the direction of research was defined. It is particularly commendable that specific technologies which can be applied to the Korean lunar exploration project were identified among the existing technologies already developed and owned by the state-funded research institutes.
For instance, the core technologies of aerospace secondary cells and weight reduction are applicable to explorers (supervisory institute: KASI). High definition camera technologies are applicable to payload (supervisory institute: KASI). There were discussions on cooperation with NASA over specification design and core control technology analysis for the development of deep space antenna for lunar exploration (supervisory institute: ETRI), and the development and operation of ground stations of Korean deep space network. In addition, the research institutes developed the design of a double body mechanism resistant to the environment on the moon and created a model to verify lunar exploration rover technologies (supervisory institute: KIST).
This year, the participating institutes will conduct further research on the technologies which were found to be applicable to the lunar exploration project during the 1st-year of the convergence research, and will carry out research to verify their applicability to the lunar exploration project. All of these research activities will be done with their own financial resources led by Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Moon Hae-ju, Head of Science, Nuclear, Big Science Bureau at the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, said “It is very encouraging that the 15 state-funded research institutes made such achievements through voluntary cooperation. They set a good example of cooperation among research institutes. Going forward, continuous research on convergence will contribute to the successful implementation of the lunar exploration project, and the Ministry will certainly secure a budget for the project next year and let the state-funded research institutes better concentrate on research.”